An article in The Washington Post puts forward the idea that this year’s Presidential debates had a large impact on who voters will decide to vote for on Tuesday:
In early September, the race was tied. In the Washington Post-ABC News poll on Sept. 9, soon after the Republican convention, McCain had a two-point lead among likely voters, 49 to 47 percent. By the poll taken just after the second Obama-McCain debate, released Oct. 13, Obama led 53 to 43. In the three weeks since, the race has been utterly stable. Yesterday, the Post-ABC tracking poll had Obama ahead 52 to 44 percent. (The margin of error in all of these polls is plus or minus 3 percent.)
Were the debates responsible for these developments? Probably. They attracted many more Americans than any other event or aspect of the campaign. According to Nielsen, the four debates this fall attracted a total audience of 242 million (of course, many people watched all four). “The debates had a big impact,” says Andrew Kohut of the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, the dean of American pollsters. “Obama won all three by huge margins.”
One analyst, a Republican no less, compares this year’s debate to the single debate in 1980 between Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter:
Frank Fahrenkopf, chairman of the Republican National Committee during most of the Reagan era, is the Republican co-chairman of the Commission on Presidential Debates, which brings us these quadrennial spectacles. “We were extremely pleased with the way the debates turned out” this year, Fahrenkopf said this week. “I think they were very important.”
Fahrenkopf offers an analysis of the debates that has historical roots:
“I analogize this election to 1980,” he says, using a brand of English that suggests too many years spent in Washington. That year, he recalls, the country was in terrible shape and voters ached to make a change, but the candidate offering change was a former movie actor named Ronald Reagan. “The American people wondered, was this guy up to it?” All that uncertain voters wanted was reassurance that Reagan wasn’t too risky a choice, Fahrenkopf says.
(…)
“I think it took Obama three debates for people to see how calm he was, how composed he was, that you couldn’t get to this guy,” says Fahrenkopf. “He was very well organized. By the time that final debate was over, I think he satisfied the qualms of the American people.”
“Then,” he adds, “when the economy went into the ditch, McCain had a really tough battle.”
Of course, Fahrenkopf gets the timing wrong in one important respect; the credit crisis and the problems on Wall Street had started before the debates even started. John McCain even tried to get the first debate postponed as part of his “suspension of the campaign” scheme. To a large degree, then, it was the economic crisis that dominated all three debates — even the first debate which was supposed to have focused on national security issues, a shift in topic that clearly favored Obama.
Not only was it Obama’s performance in the debates that helped solidify the shift in public opinion in his direction, but his response to the crisis, compared to McCain’s haphazard and, in the end, inexplicable response, seems to have erased most of the advantages that McCain had on the so-called “leadership” question.
So, yes, the debates have played in role in the way this campaign have gone, but only because they have served as a crucible in which the candidates responses to a crisis situation could be evaluated by the public. Based on the way the polls have gone, it seems clear that McCain failed the test.
